Why name a product Flare?!

I thought I would start out with something light but interesting. A bit of insight into the beginnings of MadCap Software.

A few people have asked about the name of our flagship product, MadCap Flare, and how it came to be named that. Well many people know about our background and our long involvement with the RoboHelp product line, and as the product manager for RoboHelp I found that a product with the name “Help” in it became extremely limiting. The plans we had for Flare were so much stronger than anything we ever did in the RoboHelp days that we definately didn’t want to limit ourselves in the same way by including the word help in the product title. But, then, what to name the new product?

Lots of ideas were bandied about, lots of brainstorming, and then it came to us. What is the international signal for, “I need help”? Why, you shoot off a Flare so that people can find you. This reference to help, or assistance, without explicitly using the word seemed too great to not use. So the product became Flare, or MadCap Flare. Unfortunately, I guess we had been watching too many episodes of Survivor or something, because nobody ever seems to get the back story without an explanation.

2 Responses to “Why name a product Flare?!”

Thanks for the explanation. But how then does the name “Blaze” come about. I once mentioned that to one of my supervisors at a previous job and he asked me if the MadCap guys are a bunch of pyromaniacs and if the next product is called “Explosion” or “Fire”. I find Flare and Blaze creative names and they are different, exactly as stated not like all the “WhateverHelp” products.
So what then happened with “Capture”? And what is up with “Echo”? Echo doesn’t even offer an echo effect. See, a whole bunch of topics for new blog posts.